


Zenosyne

by lunarecrypt



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, alternate title: Onion Crisps, talking out your feelings except one doesn't speak, why does no one ask byleth what happened during those five years huh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22867906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarecrypt/pseuds/lunarecrypt
Summary: Zenosyne:(adj) The sense that time keeps moving faster.Or, Byleth opens up about the five years spent sleeping.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Zenosyne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laquearia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laquearia/gifts).



> Do none of the characters ever think to, you know, ASK Byleth about those five years? No? Poor Byleth. 
> 
> For one of my best friends, Laq. I adore you. Happy way, way belated birthday, sorry I took so long!

The cathedral is quiet, silence seeping out from under every pew and settling beneath her skin. She taps the dusty floor with the steel tip of her boot and does not flinch when it echoes too loudly in her ears. If she closes her eyes, she imagines she could recall Mercedes’ soft prayers or Ashe’s bubbling laughter.

But she doesn’t close her eyes, doesn’t dare miss yet another minute of her Lions growing older. 

Her gaze drifts to the pile of rubble where stained-glass windows once stood, to the man standing in front of it. It’s a monstrous pile of broken stone and swirling dust, untouched in the five years she—

 _“I will bring you her head,”_ Dimitri growls. It’s the first thing he’s said in four days; his voice wilts and cracks with disuse, rumbling through dead air and plate armor and five years of lost time. Byleth’s eyes fall shut against her will, something in her chest squeezing just shy of painful.

She stands from her pew and dares a step forward. The sound of footfalls echo all around them, a reminder that she is here, that she is no longer at the bottom of a ravine under a thousand tons of rock and regret. She can see Dimitri’s profile from where she stands at his side, all unkempt hair and sallow skin. When was the last time anyone saw him eat? 

He doesn’t see her. She supposes that’s to be expected when she stands on the side of his missing eye. No one knows how it happened, only that it had. She glances around Dimitri’s cloak to his left side, feels the absent presence like a physical weight in her chest. 

“I miss him, you know,” she tells Dimitri. “I never got to say goodbye to him… to any of you.”

He doesn’t react to her words, even when she stands in front of him. His eye remains fixed over her shoulder, a sightless gaze turned inside out by voices and demons she never knew. She takes one shuddering breath—inhale, hold, exhale—and lets some of the tension coiled in her gut fade, staring at Dimitri’s black boots and the thin layer of dust on top. She’s never been very good with words when it matters, so when the next ones leave her lips, it surprises her.

“I’m sorry, Dimitri. For leaving you, for… for not being here when you needed me.”

She knows the words don’t register—nothing she says does, anymore. Her gaze tracks slowly up his body, cataloguing every nick and dent in his armor. There’s a scratch on the outside of his right thigh where one of Ashe’s arrows had pierced the eye of a solider who had tried to drag Dimitri down by his cloak—a harsh silver line among the plates of black. A small dent near his left shoulder warps the reflection of the moon, and she recalls with sickening clarity the tip of Dimitri’s lance through the skull of the archer that tried to shoot him. She moves her gaze to his chest, to the blessedly damage-free armor near his neck, to the black fabric covering a scar she hadn’t yet seen. Her breath catches when she catches sight of his left eye.

He’s staring right at her, a rare clarity in his eye pinning her to the spot. He opens his mouth a fraction, and she aches to reach out and touch him, to tell him that she’s _here_ again, that she hasn’t left him again even if it feels like a piece of her is still lost in that endless dark. 

Byleth raises one trembling hand. Dimitri does not break her gaze, does not flinch when she places her hand over the blue X on his chest. 

“Will you come back to me?” she breathes, pushing her hand against his chest like she can press her warmth into the skin beneath. “Will you forgive me for abandoning you?”

Dimitri’s lips move soundlessly, a whisper of nothing against the silence left behind by her words. He holds her gaze, piercing and half-present, an echo of the calculating and smiling boy she used to know. 

She sees the second he loses himself again, eye going glassy and unfocused, staring over her shoulder at nothing once more. She feels the loss of him all at once, a weight more crushing than the stone she’d been buried under. Her hand falls back to her side.

 _Pull yourself together,_ she imagines Sothis saying, all prim and proper. Byleth huffs a breath—a wobbly, bitter thing that can’t be mistaken for a laugh. Dimitri doesn’t react. 

She recalls a moment from back when they’d rescued Flayn, when she and Dimitri were alone after the rest of the Lions had scattered for the night and he’d fallen into a chair with his head between his knees. 

He’d been panicking—barely breathing and nearly crushing his own knees in an iron grip. Byleth had seen it many times before, of course, in the years she’d been a mercenary. So she’d sat on the ground next to him, one hand on his while she spoke in soothing tones about nonsensical things. When she’d run out of things to say, she’d sung a soft lullaby her father sang to her as a child. 

Dimitri had told her afterwards, when he’d recovered from embarrassment and started breathing again, that having a voice to focus on helped ground him, helped keep him in the present.

She hums and clears off a large chunk of stone before sitting cross-legged on it, facing Dimitri and breathing deeply. She’d come here tonight to escape closing her eyes, to escape the fear that she will fall asleep and wake up five more years into the future, to escape the crushing fear of that darkness consuming her and smothering her once again. But sitting in the ruins of Garreg Mach, she thinks that maybe she can explain why she left, if only to him. 

“It wasn’t my choice to leave you all,” she starts. “I was… really only trying to help Rhea. She was being attacked by those damn beasts, and she was losing.”

Dimitri’s gaze stays unfocused, though his head shifts ever so slightly in her direction. She takes it as a good sign, and recounts the battle. She tells him about Rhea’s transformation, about jumping back into the fray. She tells him about the glimpse of darkness before a blast of light, about how she pushed back with her sword and about the rock crumbling beneath her feet. She tells him how her last thought was that she was abandoning him. 

She tells him about the darkness, all-encompassing and omnipresent. 

She tells him how it never leaves her.

“When I saw you, it was like seeing a ghost,” she laughs bitterly, recalling a time when she’d said as much about herself to a goddess on a throne inside her mind. “When I saw you in that tower all covered in blood? I thought… well. I thought a lot of things.”

She looks to Dimitri, but he hasn’t moved. He is barely breathing. 

“I think a part of me is still in that ravine,” she admits. “Just like I think a part of you is still in Duscur.”

Her eyes wander to the empty spot on Dimitri’s left where Dedue would always stand.

_I guess that makes us both ghosts, doesn’t it?_

**Author's Note:**

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